Speed reducer, drive and controller, and servomotor constitute the three core parts of industrial robot, of which the cost of speed reducer is the highest, accounting for roughly 36% of the industrial robot's total costs.

In 2014, China's industrial robot market skyrocketed, with the sales volume reaching 57,000 units, up 55.9% year on year, occupying 24.9% of the global total. It is estimated that this figure would go up to 75,000 units in 2015 and 150,000 units in 2018.

Fuelled by rapid growth of Chinese industrial robot market, the demand for speed reducers surged, with the year 2015's consumption of some 150,000 sets. If each industrial robot is equipped with 4.5 precision reducers (normally one industrial robot needy of 4-6 sets), the added demand for industrial robot speed reducers alone would reach 675,000 sets till 2018.

Despite a thriving market demand in China, China's industrial robot reducers mainly rely on imports due to a lack of core technologies. Thus, the market is basically monopolized by the companies like Nabtesco, HarmonicDrive, Sumitomo, SEJINIGB, and Spinea.

In Made in China 2025, industrial robots are catalogued as one of the key fields to be developed in future. Meanwhile, the program pointed out that China will break the technical bottleneck of robot body, reducer, servo motor, controller, sensors, drive, and other key components and system integration design and manufacturing. It is expected that China's industrial robots, speed reducers, and other core components will achieve leapfrog development.